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AWS Cost Explorer vs IBM Kubecost comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 16, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS Cost Explorer
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
12th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Financial Data Analysis Platforms (3rd)
IBM Kubecost
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
15th
Average Rating
9.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of AWS Cost Explorer is 2.5%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Kubecost is 1.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
AWS Cost Explorer2.5%
IBM Kubecost1.6%
Other95.9%
Cloud Cost Management
 

Featured Reviews

Andrea-Carella - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at GFT Group
Has provided valuable cost insights but could improve in filtering options
AWS Cost Explorer is used to visualize, analyze, and manage spending on the cloud. It can also make a forecast on how much you will spend and gives you information about past costs you had in the cloud in various regions for various different tools. For example, you can see how much it will cost to use a specific product in the future. You can also set a timeline for how much you will use that product to see the effective amount of money you are going to spend. You can compare various tools in order to see which are the most suited tools for your needs and which are the most expensive. You can filter by region and by specific product in order to see which costs are the most important in your organization and cloud environment. You can identify what is not necessary and what you can reduce. It has many good features that you can use with best practices. You can integrate AWS Cost Explorer, and it gives you a better overview of all the related aspects to the costing part of your infrastructure. AWS Cost Explorer is beneficial because you can access a simple interface where you can get an overview of all the costs you have in the cloud environment. You can see which costs you can reduce and how you can move from a specific product to another product in order to reduce costs and improve other aspects. It depends on the specific needs of the organization, but the most important advantage AWS Cost Explorer gives you is the ability to have a clear understanding of your cloud spending.
DIRK UYTTERHOEVEN - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Enterprise Architect at DV Consulting
Identifies and eliminates overprovisioning of expensive resources like storage, highly scalable and offers performance
I like the overall product because I can select what monitoring should be enabled and whatnot. In our case, we really focus on performance because it's clear that the price is related to most performance setups. So the more performance, the more expensive. So we look into the performance that the customer needs, and then based upon that feedback from the remote control, we change the parameters. And even the end user will not notice it is not using it, so we just make money without any impact on the end users.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"AWS Cost Explorer is beneficial because you can access a simple interface where you can get an overview of all the costs you have in the cloud environment."
"I find the forecasting feature particularly valuable as it helps predict future expenses."
"It offers a detailed examination of your cluster, including the types of instances utilized, allocated CPU and RAM, and resource distribution for specific applications."
"I mostly like the dashboards."
"The price is reasonable, considering the value it delivers."
 

Cons

"One disadvantage of AWS Cost Explorer is that you cannot filter too much. You cannot filter data by more than one variable."
"While there is always room for improvement, any needs for enhancement depend on specific requirements at the time. Currently, I cannot pinpoint any specific improvements needed."
"There is a significant potential for enhancing it through the incorporation of advanced technologies like AI and generative AI."
"The integration with other solutions could be improved."
"Faster monitoring could potentially improve overall stability in the production environment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The cost is cheap. Kubecost has an open-source core."
"The real savings come from using Kubecost features like autoscaling and serverless functions to optimize your resource usage. If you treat it like a data center migration without fine-tuning, it might cost more."
"The cost of the tool may seem nominal compared to the potential savings in infrastructure expenses."
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Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with AWS Cost Explorer?
One disadvantage of AWS Cost Explorer is that you cannot filter too much. You cannot filter data by more than one variable. It depends on the specific permissions you assign to the group that will ...
What is your primary use case for AWS Cost Explorer?
We have been handling all of the AWS infrastructure for the customer for maybe two years.
What do you like most about Kubecost?
The price is reasonable, considering the value it delivers.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kubecost?
The price is reasonable, considering the value it delivers. In all honesty, once you have your optimal design, you could just turn it off and then activate it maybe once every six months or once ev...
What needs improvement with Kubecost?
In future releases, I would like to see faster monitoring because it could potentially improve overall stability in the production environment.
 

Also Known As

Reserved Instance Reporting
Kubecost - Amazon EKS cost monitoring
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Cost Explorer vs. IBM Kubecost and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,853 professionals have used our research since 2012.